Spotlight

Fellini’s Ghost

In The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza), director Paolo Sorrentino’s corrosive satire of Berlusconi-era Rome, out this month, Toni Servillo portrays Jep Gambardella, a dissipated journalist who is elegantly sliding into an existential crisis. Jep is symbolic of modern Italy itself in the film, which is heavily embroidered with allusions to Federico Fellini’s oeuvre, including several sequences in which the protagonist takes lonely, late-night walks along an abandoned Via Veneto, once the epicenter of the post–World War II Italian film renaissance, indelibly recorded in La Dolce Vita, but today just a ghost street of government offices and overpriced hotels. Servillo, 54, a native of the city of Afragola, is often compared to Marcello Mastroianni, who appeared in six of Fellini’s films, and he is poised to become the only Italian leading man since Mastroianni to ascend to international stardom. The Great Beauty marks his fourth collaboration with Sorrentino, who has cast him in the roles of a fading lounge singer in One Man Up (2001), a Mafia pawn in The Consequences of Love (2004), and the late Italian prime minister and master manipulator, Giulio Andreotti, in Il Divo (2008). In Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008), about the Camorra, the Neapolitan crime syndicate, Servillo played a corrupt businessman. He lives outside Naples, where he runs one of Italy’s prominent theater companies, Teatri Uniti, and has also directed musical theater, including Beethoven’s Fidelio for the San Carlo opera house. “When I start preparing for a new role,” he says, “the most important thing is the text. It must be strong and fascinating, as Sorrentino’s scripts usually are.”